Autodesk releases SeaWater (another WHAT IF post)

[ This is another WHAT IF post which responds to the challenge formulated in Alife vs AGI. You are welcome to suggest another one or to make your own.]

The following is a picture of a random splash of sea water, magnified 25 times [source]

As well, it could be just a representation of the state of the IoT in a small neighbourhood of you, according to the press release describing SeaWater, the new product of Autodesk.

“SeaWater is a design tool for the artificial life based decentralized Internet of Things. Each of the tiny plankton beings which appear in the picture is actually a program, technically called a GLC actor. Each plankton being has it’s own umwelt, it’s own representation of the medium which surrounds it. Spatially close beings in the picture share the same surrounding and thus they can interact. Likewise, the tiny GLC actors interact locally one with another, not in real space, but on the Net. There is no real space in the Net, instead, SeaWater represents them closer when they do interact.

Sea Water is a tool for Net designers. We humans are visual beings. A lot of our primate brains powers can be harnessed for designing the alife decentralized computing which form the basis of the Internet of Things.

It improves very much the primitive tools which give things like this picture [source]

As Andrew Hessel points out, life is a programming language (chemically based), as well as the virtual world. They are the same, sharing the same principles of computation. The IoT is a translation tool which unites these worlds and lets them be one.

This is the far reaching goal. But in the meantime we have to learn how to design this. Imagine that we may import real beings, say microbes, to our own unique Microbiome OS. There is no fundamental difference between synthetic life, artificial life and real life, at least at this bottom level.

Instead of aiming for human or superhuman artificial intelligence, the alife decentralized computing community wants to build a world where humans are not treated like bayesian units by pyramidal centralized constructs. There is an immense computing power already at the bottom of alife, where synthetic biology offers many valuable lessons.